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by cbhl
4615 days ago
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Personally, I think Canonical is heading in the right direction with regards to convergence, with Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Desktop running off of the same kernel and device. I suspect that it's going to be hard going for at least another two or three years, though, especially since they'll have to target existing off-the-shelf hardware, and virtually all of the latest-and-greatest devices have proprietary binary drivers for the graphics chips. (For a while, Google couldn't even release the binary graphics driver for the 2nd-gen Nexus 7, let alone an open-source one.) At this point, I think a converged device would only hurt Apple's profitability and brand. Why would you buy a Macbook and an iPhone if you could get away with just one? Plus, we'd have to deal with the differing instruction sets. (It's one thing to write an app targeting mobile and compile it for ARM; it's another to suddenly expect 3rd-party developers to start cross-compiling desktop apps for ARM and phone hardware isn't fast enough to emulate Intel chips the way Intel chips emulated PPC during the last architecture transition.) I know Microsoft has been trying to appear more vibrant with their university recruiting efforts; they often play up the opportunities to work on Windows Phone and XBox. At the end of the day, though, developers there still have to deal with the bureaucracy and code that hasn't been touched in decades. Microsoft has often been one to explore new form factors (Windows CE; XP-based tablets, XP-based media centers), and I'm sure they still pour lots of R&D into it even today. Making products that are good enough for users and priced low enough for people to buy them, however, is still a challenge, I think. |
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I agree, but I also see this as the moment their product line would start to calcify. I don't worry about Apple's ability to make the smart moves, but it seems like this will come to a head.
I saw this from another HN post, a quote from a Microsoft VP:
"Let’s be clear – helping folks kill time on a tablet is relatively easy. Give them books, music, videos and games, and they’ll figure out the rest. Pretty much all tablets do that.
"But helping people be productive on a tablet is a little trickier."
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/23/microsoft-bashes-apples-...
No matter who says it, it's true.